My girlfriend found a cool little rental house for me yesterday on Craigslist, it was in the area I’m actively searching in and surprisingly within my price range considering it had one more bedroom than I needed and had all sorts of new improvements. I naturally assumed it was 75% black mold and open asbestos, was haunted, or, likely both (that’s all that made sense to me).
Unfortunately, the house is probably fine, but some third thing I hadn’t thought of came up: it was all an elaborate (kind of) scam. Luckily, I’m real smart and sniffed it out within the first sentence, somewhere in the red area:
“Hello ,
Thanks for you response,I am the owner of the property you interested on,a missionary with the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church in West Africa…”
I was sad, even though I knew it was too good to be true, I felt like you do when you fool yourself into believing your Powerball ticket is, “really going to hit this time,” and then, you know.
Anyway, of course the email ended up asking for a bunch of my information, and even better, the sender’s name is apparently, “Am Nice,” so clearly, this is someone with a psychology degree… but I was about to find that beyond that, this evil genius was also well-versed in the dark arts of email marketing. *cue: buh-buh-BUH!*
I did a quick search of the phone number, which, yes, goes somewhere in Pankshin, Africa (that was as far as I felt like researching), where I assume I was to pay my first month’s rent. Google showed me a blog covering this Craigslist scam with a copy of the email they had received, and lo and behold, there were slight variations – this person is A/B testing their emails, I thought… and then I told everyone in the office, then I thought, what a good blog idea… and then, erm, now.
First variant:
My email: The sender’s name is the aforementioned Am Nice. I laughed at first wondering if they really thought that would work, but then I was like, oh, maybe this person had hippie parents, I mean, I went to school with a guy whose last name was Nice. For a moment, I felt bad for Am Nice, the barely literate home renter.
Email B: The signee’s name is Howard Bradshaw. I feel like, already, this one surely has the edge out of the gate.
Second Variant:
My email:
“Hello ,
Thanks for you response,I am the owner of the property you interested on,a missionary with the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church in West Africa.I am presently serving as Camp Director with the United Methodist Church in West Africa, Nigeria.”
Email B:
“Hello , Thanks for you response,I am the owner of the property you interested on,a missionary with the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church International, I am presently serving as Camp Director with the United Methodist Church in West Africa, Nigeria.”
Interesting. Perhaps the “International” would have allayed my fears for a split second longer? I mean, you can’t flat-out say that you’re part of an African church off the top – the “missionary” bit hardly covers it, does it? At this point already I wish I could see this guy’s (or girl’s) analytics.
Third Variant:
My email:
“Note: We Intend selling the property before my wife reason to it that we should not sell it any longer,that the best way is to rent for future purpose,so if in case you drive by and see a sign board with a number on it,please disregard it,be cos we have ask them to get the sign of our property that we are not selling any longer,that it’s for rent now by us…”
Email B: Wisely, this version left out the whole, “Hey, it might look like the place is for sale, but that’s jokes,” note.
Summary:
I’m willing to bet that this criminal mastermind’s B email is beating the crap out of A, but I’ll likely never know. Maybe after I post this I’ll email good ol’ Am Nice back and see if they’ll let me know how it’s going. Hmmm, I’ll have to look close at Mail Chimp’s Monkey Awards program, I may have a partnership in my future…
*ahem* Also, the moral of this story is that’s it’s smart to A/B test your email marketing campaigns, heck, maybe add a C in there if your list is large enough. Just imagine how sad our buddy would have been had he only used his clearly inferior A up there. Only the largest derelicts looking for rental property would have even attempted to follow through – imagine the headaches in trying to walk someone like that through the process of wiring money to you.
